


to every man upon this earth

by Othalla



Category: Oblivion (2013)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Introspection, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28721868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Othalla/pseuds/Othalla
Summary: Tech-52, after the End of the World.
Relationships: Original Jack Harper/Original Vika Olsen/Original Vika Olsen
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Holly Poly 2020





	to every man upon this earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplecoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplecoffee/gifts).



He woke up in the desert where he’d met himself, throat aching and knees unsteady.

In the sky, a star exploded.

-

-

For all that Sanctuary was a refuge from a ravaged world, both for those like Sykes (who didn’t know anything else) and those like Tech-49 (who built it), it wasn’t his home. It wasn’t his home even with Julia in it, because while he could recall offering her a ring and her saying _yes_ , that was about the extent of it.

It was not enough.

 _Jack Harper_ , the one who’d left some sixty years past, wasn’t back. He remained more the number on his chest than anything else. He was Tech-52. A clone.

Some of the elderly scavengers still flinched when they looked at him.

In the end, leaving Sanctuary was almost easier than making the decision to find it in the first place, each step a little lighter than the one before, each consequent breath a little sweeter. When he passed the last remnants of the forest surrounding Sanctuary, pushing the foliage away from his face, the sun that met him was warm.

It felt good.

-

He went back to Tower-52.

Vika wasn’t there. He hadn’t expected her to be ( _I won’t go with you_ ), but he also hadn’t expected her _not_ to be, either. There was only empty space to find – a layer of dust and pipes that clanged and shook for a minute before water came flowing through the tap and into the sink.

This place, on the top of a mountain and below the sky, had been his home base for most of what he could remember. He had slept in this bed, ate at this table (fucked and been fucked on both), leaving every morning to come back again every night.

Even back then, before he knew, it hadn’t been his home.

It still wasn’t.

-

He looked in the pool before he left, just to make sure. She wasn’t there, either.

(The relief was a quiet thing, settling in his bones like dust after an earthquake.)

-

The closest border to a Radiation Zone was to the north, so he drove that way, on the bike the scavengers had left him because, well, it had his number on it. He was thankful for that, now, even though he’d tried to refuse it when they wanted him to keep it. They had more use for it, he’d thought.

(They didn’t want to use it, was the thing.)

It took two days and change before the environment became one he knew in theory (because the End of the World came in many shades of the same thing) but had never seen in person.

It didn’t make him feel any different.

-

He kept going north, figuring he might as well.

-

He didn’t see any traces of people. Maybe they existed here, too, still hidden in places he didn’t know where to look. Maybe they had joined with Beech, a man whose memory would live on for decades to come, in the earlier stages of the End of the World.

Maybe they were all long dead and gone.

He stopped at the remains of buildings he could find, just to make sure, but he found nothing but dust.

-

Tower-54, when he found it, was empty.

(He slept one night on the couch and left as the sun rose above the horizon, feeling alien and out of place. His throat never stopped aching.)

-

He drove north.

-

He stopped counting the days after a while. 

He stopped counting the towers, too.

(They were all empty, in one way or another.)

-

Eventually he found himself circling back. He went deeper into the mainland, abandoning the coast entirely, heading south. It was like there was a rope tied to him from a point he’d left behind, and while he could keep moving, he could not go further away. He did not want to.

He passed by Sanctuary, looking at it from a distance, considering it for a few long moments before deciding he wasn’t ready, before he went the way he’d left it.

Back to Tower-52.

-

It was not empty, when he arrived.

-

A glass shattered and the sound was louder than anything he’d heard in months.

“Jack?”

Vika stood by the entrance of Tower-52, one hand in front of her mouth and countless pieces of glass by her high-heeled feet. Something moved behind her, a black shape he could barely distinguish from the shadows around it, but he did not pay it attention. She was dressed like he remembered her.

(He wondered, for a second, if he might not have simply dreamt a very long dream, and everything but this had been an illusion and the world was still ending.)

He raised his hand.

“Hi, Vika,” he said, voice quiet and hoarse from lack of use. “How have you been?”

Vika ran up to him, heedless of the shards of glass, and hugged him with a strength he hadn’t noticed she possessed before he’d left.

He hugged her back. He did not let go.

-

Eventually Vika drew back, taking his hand in hers, and pulled him into the tower properly.

“Come, meet Victoria,” she said. The smile on her face was warm and she looked happier than he’d ever seen her.

It suited her.

-

“So, you’re Vika’s Jack,” Victoria (Tower 41) said.

She looked like Vika in the way that he had looked like Tech-49 except also not at all. There had been slight differences between him and Tech-49, a scar here and there, and glasses instead of a scarf, the amount of wear on their clothes, little things. Victoria, however, had scars that climbed from the left side of her face and down her collarbone, disappearing beneath her dress. The scars have healed and look to be some years old, but they’re deep enough that they would probably stand out until she died.

“Accident,” she said with a shrug when she spotted him looking at them.

“Ah,” he said, and that was that.

-

He slept on the couch.

-

“I stayed for half a year or so after you left,” Vika said the next morning over tea and food he did not want to consider the origin of. “Then Victoria came, and I decided I might as well go with her and die wherever than stay here and drown where you could find me.”

He didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so he didn’t.

Victoria was not at the table (out for a walk, he didn’t ask), so she didn’t reply either.

The silence was not as uncomfortable as he thought it would be.

Vika snorted. “Actually, I thought it was you coming back at first. I heard the bike and just assumed it would be you. Not like I had believed you when you said –“

She cut herself off, jaw tense and frown prominent.

“If it helps,” he offered after a moment, “I probably wouldn’t have believed myself, either, had I not been strangled by another version of myself.” He touched his throat, the feeling lingering through the years.

He didn’t wear a scarf nowadays.

Vika looked at him for a few long moments, her eyes on his hand on his neck. He moved it away, hiding it in his pocket below the table.

“I bet,” she said finally. She didn’t look any happier.

-

They touch a lot, Vika and Victoria. One hand on a back there, hip to hip, shoulders touching on the couch. He didn’t notice it at first but over the weeks he found himself chasing them with his eyes, all too aware of what they mean. They haven’t kissed in his presence yet, but it was probably only a matter of time.

He was not sure how he felt about it.

-

(He was sure how he felt about it.)

-

Viktoria didn’t wear high heels, usually content to walk around in her bare feet (scarred, he didn’t ask), and she wore more of what he could recognize as clothing he’d been assigned than she wore the sort of garments Vika used.

“It’s easier,” she said. “To breathe, for one. To move in general, too.”

She reached for a screwdriver from the topmost shelf as if to show him how easy it was to move, and her shirt hitched up to show a sliver of skin.

He couldn’t stop staring at it.

-

They fall into bed together.

It was big enough.

(They weren’t so lonely, now, but that did not change everything.)

-

Victoria had a hand on his throat. Not squeezing, there was barely any pressure at all, it was simply there, a solid, warm weight against his skin.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Each breath was more laborious than the last, his pulse climbing and climbing, each swallow catching against her skin. His entire world felt like it was revolving around that one small hand on his throat. He felt like he was going to collapse into tiny pieces of himself at any moment, shattered from the force of it.

“Relax,” Vika said from behind him. “We got you.”

She curled a hand through his hair, gripping it gently and pulling his head back. Her weight was a warm presence against his back. Her breasts were flush against his skin, her knees behind his keens, her hand on his waist.

She kissed the top of his head as Victoria kissed him on the mouth.

The world went quiet.

-

They weren’t good before, him and Vika. They were like two celestial objects, gravitating in circles around a point of origin, getting closer and closer together, heading for an inevitable collision. They had been falling apart for longer than they’d been building themselves up, and it had showed.

He couldn’t help but think that maybe they’d be better, now.

-

(They were still celestial objects, destined to meet and pray it didn’t mean they would also end.)

-

(He couldn’t help but hope.)

-

-

He fell asleep to the sound of steady breathing and no chill in his bones.

In the sky, the remains of the moon shone.


End file.
